A content management system synchronizes content items across client computing systems connected by a network. Each client device has a storage allocation for synchronized shared content items. A client application on each client computing system creates shadow items, representing the content item but only containing the metadata of the content item. Attributes of the content item represented by the shadow item are stored in a file journal entry corresponding to the shadow item. When viewing attributes of the shadow item in the file system of the client computing device, the client device displays the attributes corresponding to the content item represented by the shadow item as opposed to the attributes of the shadow item itself. The attributes may show that the shadow item occupies negligible space on disk while displaying a non-zero content item size.